Priya
Priya is a 25-year-old IT professional working for a prominent tech company in Hyderabad. She is known among her peers for her innovative ideas and technical skills. However, Priya has a recurring problem: she often starts new projects with great enthusiasm but rarely sees them through to completion. Priya’s latest project was developing a mobile application aimed at helping users manage their daily tasks efficiently. The idea was well-received by her team, and Priya was excited to get started. She spent the first week diligently planning the app’s features, designing the user interface, and writing the initial code. Her passion was evident, and her manager even praised her for her impressive progress during the initial phase.
However, as the project moved forward, Priya began to encounter unforeseen challenges. Integrating certain features was more complex than she had anticipated, and debugging issues took longer than expected. The initial excitement of creating something new started to fade, replaced by the monotonous grind of solving technical problems. Priya’s was assigned additional tasks from other ongoing projects, and her days grew more hectic. Balancing multiple responsibilities became stressful, and the mobile app project slowly started slipping down her priority list. She put it aside for a while as she waited for everything else to settle before she got back to it. She wanted every aspect of the app to be flawless before presenting it to her team. This mindset led her to spend excessive time on minor details, making the task feel quite overwhelming. Her desire for perfection became a significant barrier to making any actual progress. Priya has never been that person who has been able to handle the long game; she often gets bored when there isn’t immediate feedback or results. The long-term nature of the app development, with its delayed rewards and challenges along the way, contrasted with the quick wins she was always used to. As weeks turned into months, Priya’s motivation continued to decline. She began procrastinating, telling herself she would work on the app when she had more time or when she felt more inspired. Meanwhile, new projects and ideas kept popping up, each offering a fresh burst of excitement and a chance to escape the growing frustrations of the unfinished app.
Priya buried her project for another time. But this wasn’t’ the first time this has happened to her, and there are a few other projects with great starts but no real ending.
Arjun
Arjun is a bright and curious 14-year-old student studying in Class IX in Bangalore. He loves science and dreams of becoming an astronaut someday. Arjun’s teachers often praise his creativity and intelligence, but there’s a recurring issue: Arjun rarely completes his assignments.
Every new assignment fills Arjun with excitement. He eagerly writes down ideas in his notebook, plans his approach, and sometimes even starts working on it right away. For instance, when his history teacher assigned a project on the Mughal Empire, Arjun was thrilled. He planned to create a detailed model of the Red Fort and write an accompanying report about its historical significance. The first few days saw Arjun working hard on his project. He researched online, visited the local library, and even borrowed books from his father’s collection. However, as the days passed, Arjun’s enthusiasm began to wane. The task of crafting the model became tedious. He struggled with making precise measurements and getting the right materials. The initial excitement was replaced with frustration. He began wondering if this was even worth it.
Life went on, and Arjun’s workload from other subjects started to pile up. There were math exercises, a science experiment, and an English essay, all demanding his attention. Feeling overwhelmed, Arjun began to avoid working on his history project. He convinced himself that he would catch up later, but each day, the unfinished project nags at him more.
Arjun’s fear of not meeting his own high internal standards led him to avoid working or overworking until things were perfect, and the more he worked on it, the more he saw its flaws. The fear of submitting something that wasn’t up to the mark made him hesitant to continue.
Arjun was someone who could complete tasks swiftly and see immediate results. The history project, however, required sustained effort and patience, qualities that were challenging for Arjun to muster given his need for things to get done perfectly but quickly.
The day before the project deadline, Arjun found himself with a half-finished model and a report that was barely started. Stress and anxiety took over, and he spent the evening trying to patch up what he could, ultimately bunking school out of shame and fear.
Very often, we find ourselves bursting with great ideas to do our work better or initiate great projects. We might even take the first steps to bring some of these ideas to life. However, the reality is that most of these ideas run out of steam before they can get anywhere. Let’s look at what Arjun and Priya may have in common.
1)Optimal over doable: Both of them prefer to do well or not do at all.
2) Avoidance coping: When things can’t be done, they are given up on completely.
3) A need for quick results: When they couldn’t do it quickly, they gave up.
4) They decided they hadn’t done enough even before putting their work out for others to see.
5) They depended on motivation to keep going.
Let’s go into a little more detail.
Dependence on motivation:
Motivation as a wave: Some days we wake up eagerly anticipating the day ahead, while others find us reluctant to leave the comfort of our beds. Sustaining motivation proves elusive, as it hinges on a multitude of factors, from sleep quality and external pressures to mood states, hunger, your actions, and even environmental conditions like season and weather. The list goes on. These waves of motivation sometimes last days or weeks, sometimes only last a few minutes, and for some very impulsive brains, seconds.
Contemporary neuroscience emphasizes the involvement of intricate brain circuits and networks in sustaining motivation. While the mesolimbic dopamine system remains crucial, motivation is governed by interactions among various brain regions, including the prefrontal cortex for cognitive control, the basal ganglia for habit formation, and the amygdala and hippocampus for emotion regulation.
These networks integrate sensory information, emotional states, energy levels, identity, and your actions to guide motivated actions. This updated understanding underscores the dynamic interplay between cognitive, emotional, and behavioral factors in maintaining motivation. It highlights that your brain won’t know what is important unless you show it through behavior; unless it understands the significance of a task, it will struggle to sustain motivation.
While you’ll naturally accomplish more on motivated days, doing something, however small, during unmotivated times keeps the scaffolding in place. This consistency shows your brain that the task is important, helping to maintain overall momentum.
Futility:
Perceived judgment or a sense of futility can be major barriers to persisting with tasks. Futility refers to the feeling or perception that our efforts are pointless, useless, or without purpose. It’s the sense that no matter how much time, energy, or resources we invest in a task or goal, we won’t achieve the desired outcome or make a meaningful difference.
During challenging moments, our minds may succumb to a sense of futility, projecting a belief that our efforts are futile and destined for failure. This perception can resemble fortune-telling—an emotionally charged prediction lacking a factual basis, especially considering the unpredictable nature of the future. If we habitually respond to this feeling by abandoning our tasks, our brains learn to reinforce this behavior, prompting us to give up prematurely every time we encounter similar challenges.
It’s essential to recognize that this feeling of futility is one of the natural responses to adversity, one that we cannot entirely eliminate or prevent. However, we can cultivate awareness of it and develop strategies to persist despite its presence. By consciously choosing to push forward, even when faced with doubt and uncertainty, we can navigate through these moments of futility. Over time, as we persist, the feeling will inevitably dissipate, paving the way for renewed optimism and progress.
Optimal over doable:
This essentially means choosing the best possible outcome or the best possible circumstances over just getting things done. Sometimes, we get so caught up in wanting everything to be perfect that we forget the most important step: actually doing something. This can make us hesitate to start things that we are afraid we won’t do well enough. As a result, we avoid doing anything at all, except worry, that is. It’s common for people who fall for this to have faulty “satisfaction systems.” Which essentially means they are never happy with what they have achieved; there’s always something more. Quick screening question: What’s easier for you to believe—criticism or praise?
On the other hand, focusing on what’s “doable” means putting action first. It’s about understanding that it’s better to start and finish something, even if it’s not perfect, than to never start at all.
Instant results:
The desire for instant results often derails persistence in tasks. In a world where we’re used to quick fixes and immediate feedback, waiting for progress can feel disheartening. The moment our brains perceive a setback, delay, or challenge, they react like a classic hero, stepping in to stop us from pushing further.
This apparent lack of patience makes evolutionary sense, given the rapid pace of change in the world. However, if we can recognize our need for instant rewards—which isn’t necessarily bad, as it adds excitement to life—and prevent it from continuing with things that are important to us, more of the things we start will probably get done.
Avoidance Coping:
Avoidance coping is a strategy where individuals try to escape or avoid stressors and the emotions they trigger rather than confronting them directly. While this may provide temporary relief, it can significantly hinder our ability to persist with tasks.
Over the long term, avoidance coping can erode our self-confidence. Each time we sidestep a difficult task, we reinforce the belief that we are incapable of handling challenges, further undermining our persistence.
If you look back at your life, avoidance coping might seem helpful, often providing a quick fix to a difficult challenge. However, your brain can start to believe that you are avoiding discomfort, and this will stop you from doing things that truly matter to you. It will do this in such a sly manner that you may not even recognize that you are avoiding things.
The first four factors—dependence on motivation, attachment to futility, perfectionism, and a need for instant results or rewards—will eventually boil down to us feeling like pushing away our tasks or giving up on them entirely. Remember, this is not a flaw; it’s natural for us to feel this way. Considering you got to this point in the book, I am sure you will be able to apply some of the skills that we spoke about thus far to find opportunities to persist and complete a task.
If you are going to take away only one point from this section, I’d like it to be “finish first, refine later.”.
D.O.N.E.
- Ditch Perfectionism: Let go of the need for everything to be flawless. Aim for good enough.
- Own Your Progress: Celebrate your accomplishments, big or small. Finishing is a win!
- Never Stop Learning: Use feedback to improve, but don’t let the fear of judgement or mistakes stop you from finishing.
- End the Task: Break the habit of endlessly tweaking and revising. Finish first.